''I read The Zone of Interest
straight through twice from beginning to end and it feels like I’ve read
nothing at all. I could read it again, if I thought it would make any
difference. Perhaps in some strange way it’s a compliment to the book –
this love story set among Germans in Auschwitz: good idea? waiting
world? story whose time has come? yes? – or to its calculation, its
finely calibrated scales, that what survives of it is (pace
Larkin) nothing. That nothing finally preponderates, no sensation
remains, no vision, no synthesis, no understanding. Amis has made
everything somehow ‘come out even’: the historical substrates of the
book (Wannsee, El Alamein, Stalingrad, Nuremberg, all alluded to) and
its flimsy fictional superstructure; true extermination and flip
invention; horrific fact and diligent if sketchy plotting. Surely it
would have been wrong if either the bittersweet glow of freshly
conceived romance or the grisly donnée of megadeath had
prevailed: the one disrespectful to history, the other to art. And so
the tawdry binary – life-death, life-death – stumbles on. It will be
left to someone or other’s gorgeous music to provide either a lift or a
settling for the Hollywood movie that will surely follow..''
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